Users take more photographs with digital cameras now than ever before. In the past, the two primary disadvantages to taking numerous photographs with digital cameras were a lack of inexpensive storage devices available, particularly if a user took many high resolution digital photographs, and high costs associated with printing the photographs on photo paper. Advances in storage technology have resulted in greater amounts of storage being sold at a lower cost, such that it is now possible for digital camera owners to purchase many gigabits of storage for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less. Further, a number of solutions are available for users to print out their own high quality paper photographs from the digital pictures they themselves took at home at a cost of pennies per print, without having to pay outrageous printing costs at a local photo laboratory or other photo processing center.
A number of software applications are available that allow a user to edit, share, and especially preview and navigate their digital images including digital photographs, wherever those digital images may be stored. Even operating systems, such as the Microsoft® Windows® family of operating systems includes an automatic preview of a folder containing digital images. Windows may be set to display up to four thumbnails of digital images contained within the folder on a folder icon, giving a user some idea of the types of images contained within the folder. Other applications may create previews in their own particular ways, such as showing a number of condensed-sized thumbnails of digital images contained within a particular folder.